Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  The CIA had reached its conclusions on Iraqi chemical weapons solely on the basis of misinterpreted pictures of Iraqi tanker trucks. The CIA had based its conclusions on Iraqi biological weapons on one source—Curveball. The CIA had based its conclusions on Iraqi nuclear weapons almost entirely on Saddam’s importation of aluminum tubes intended for conventional rocketry. “It’s almost shockingly wrong to conclude that those aluminum tubes were appropriate or designed for centrifuges for nuclear weapons,” Judge Silberman said.

  “What was such a disaster,” he said, “was for Colin Powell to have gone to the United Nations and set forth that absolutely unmistakable certain case which was based on really bad, bad stuff.”

  Judge Silberman and his presidential commission received unprecedented permission to read every article on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction from the president’s daily brief. They found that the CIA’s reports for the president’s eyes were no different from the rest of its work, including the infamous estimate—except in one regard. They were “even more misleading,” the commission found. They were, “if anything, more alarmist and less nuanced.” The president’s daily briefs, “with their attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition, left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources…. In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence—in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.”

  “WE DIDN’T GET THE JOB DONE”

  George Tenet saw that his time was over. He had done his best to revive and renew the agency. Yet he would always be remembered for one thing: reassuring the president that the CIA had “slam dunk” evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “Those were the two dumbest words I ever said,” Tenet reflected. No matter how long he lived, no matter what good deeds he might do in years to come, they would feature in the first paragraph of his obituary.

  Tenet, to his credit, asked Richard Kerr, the former deputy director of central intelligence, to investigate what had gone wrong with the Iraq estimate. The study was classified upon completion in July 2004 and stayed that way for nearly two years thereafter. When it was unsealed, it was clear why the agency had kept it under wraps. It was an epitaph. It said the CIA had all but ceased to be when the cold war came to a close; the fall of the Soviet Union had an impact on the agency “analogous to the effect of the meteor strikes on the dinosaurs.”

  In the case of Iraq, and in many other cases as well, analysts were routinely forced to “rely on reporting whose sourcing was misleading and even unreliable.” In the infamous case of Curveball, CIA officers had fair warning that the man was a liar. This warning went unheeded. That was not dereliction of duty, but it came close.

  The clandestine service routinely “used different descriptions for the same source,” so that the readers of its reports believed they had three corroborating sources of information when they had one. This was not fraud, but it came close.

  The CIA had been working on the questions of the Iraqi arsenal for more than a decade, and yet Tenet had gone to George Bush and Colin Powell on the eve of war brandishing falsehoods cloaked as hard truths. That was not a crime, but it came close.

  Tragically, this was Tenet’s legacy. He finally conceded that the CIA was wrong—not for “political reasons or a craven desire to lead the country to war” but because of its incompetence. “We didn’t get the job done,” he said.

  The meaning of that failure was left for the CIA’s chief weapons inspector, David Kay, to explain in full. “We think intelligence is important to win wars,” he said. “Wars are not won by intelligence. They’re won by the blood, treasure, courage of the young men and women that we put in the field…. What intelligence really does when it is working well is to help avoid wars.” That, in the end, was the ultimate intelligence failure.

  50. “THE BURIAL

  CEREMONY”

  On July 8, 2004, seven years after he took office, George Tenet resigned. In his farewell at CIA headquarters, he summoned up the words of Teddy Roosevelt: It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Richard Nixon had quoted the same speech the day before he left the White House in disgrace.

  Tenet retreated to write a painful personal memoir of his time at the CIA. It was a prideful, bitter book. He justly boasted of the CIA’s success—with invaluable help from British intelligence—at dismantling secret weapons programs in Pakistan and Libya. He maintained that he had transformed the agency from a shambles into a dynamo. But the machine had broken down under intolerable pressure. Tenet could not strike at al Qaeda before 9/11: “In the absence of hard intelligence,” he wrote, “covert action is a fool’s game.” And ever since the attacks, he had been swamped by tidal waves of threats that never materialized. Every day he conveyed the newest fears to the White House, and “you could drive yourself crazy believing all or even half” of what he reported. He nearly had. Gripped by uncertainty, he and the CIA had convinced themselves that Iraq’s arsenal existed. “We were prisoners of our own history,” he wrote, for the only hard facts they had were four years old. He confessed error, but it was a condemned man’s plea for absolution. Tenet came to believe that the White House wanted to blame the decision to go to war on him. It was too great a weight to bear.

  And now the critic took his turn as the man in the arena.

  Porter Goss had never been a great success at the CIA. Recruited in his junior year at Yale in 1959, he joined the clandestine service and served under Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Richard Helms. He had worked in the Latin American division for a decade, focused on Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. The highlight of his time in the Miami station was running Cuban agents on and off the island in small boats under the cover of the night in the fall of 1962.

  Nine years later, Goss was serving at the London station when a bacterial infection seized his heart and lungs and nearly killed him. He retired, recovered, bought a small newspaper in Florida, and parlayed the paper into a seat in Congress in 1988. He had a net worth of $14 million, a gentleman’s farm in Virginia, an estate on Long Island Sound, and a viceroy’s dominion over the CIA as chairman of the House intelligence committee.

  He was modest about his accomplishments at the agency. “I couldn’t get a job with CIA today,” he said in 2003. “I am not qualified.” He was right about that. But he had decided that he and he alone should be the next director of central intelligence. He had taken aim at Tenet with a vicious fusillade. His weapons were the words of the intelligence committee’s annual report on the agency.

  “IT WILL TAKE US ANOTHER FIVE YEARS”

  Published on June 21, 2004, three weeks before Tenet stepped down, the Goss report warned that the clandestine service was becoming “a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success.” Though 138,000 Americans had applied to work at the CIA in the previous year, few made the grade as spies. Tenet had just testified that “it will take us another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs.”

  Goss seized on that sad truth: “We are now in the eighth year of rebuild, and still we are more than five years away from being healthy. This is tragic.”

  Goss then turned his fire on the CIA’s intelligence directorate for producing spot news of scant value instead of the long-range strategic intelligence that had been the initial reason for creating the agency. Goss was right about that, too—and everyone in the intelligence world knew it. “We haven’t done strategic intelligence for so long that most of our analysts don’t know how to do it anymore,” said Carl W. Ford, Jr., the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from May 2001 to October 2003, and a former CIA officer.

  “As long as we rate intelligence more for its volume than its
quality, we will continue to turn out the $40 billion pile of crap we have become famous for,” Ford said. He was incensed that the agency, while transfixed by the chimerical arsenal of Saddam Hussein, had learned nothing about the nuclear weapons programs of the rest of the president’s axis of evil. “We probably knew a hundred times more about Iraq’s nuclear program than Iran’s and a thousand times more than Korea’s,” Ford said. North Korea was a blank, as it had always been. The CIA had tried to rebuild a network of agents in Iran but failed. Now Iran was a blank, too; the agency actually knew less about those nuclear programs than it had known five or ten years before.

  The CIA was in ruins, Ford said: “It’s broken. It’s so broken that nobody wants to believe it.” The Goss report made that clear. “There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action,” it said. “CIA continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff.”

  Goss was sure he had the answers. He knew that the CIA had been fooling itself and others about the quality of its work. He knew that most of the clandestine service had spent four decades of the cold war waiting and hoping for Soviets to volunteer their services as spies. He knew that its overseas officers in the war on terror spent days and nights waiting and hoping for their counterparts in Pakistan and Jordan and Indonesia and the Philippines to sell them information. He knew that the solution was to overhaul the agency.

  The 9/11 Commission created by Congress was about to issue its final report. The commission did a splendid job reconstructing the events leading up to the attacks. It did not chart a clear path forward. Nor had Congress done much to fix the agency since 9/11, other than giving it billions of dollars and plenty of free advice. The commission correctly described congressional oversight of intelligence as “dysfunctional”—the same epithet Goss hurled at the agency. For years, there had been next to no engagement on the life-and-death issues that confronted the CIA by the House and Senate intelligence committees. The House committee under Goss had produced its last substantive report on the conduct of the CIA in 1998. A quarter of a century of congressional oversight of the agency had produced little of lasting value. The intelligence committees and their staffs had applied an occasional public whipping and a patchwork of quick fixes for ever-present problems.

  It was known that the 9/11 Commission would recommend the creation of a new national intelligence director. The idea had been kicked around since Allen Dulles’s heyday. It offered no real solution to the crisis at the CIA. Rearranging the boxes on the flowchart of the government would not make it easier to run the CIA.

  “It is an organization that thrives through deception,” said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense and the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “How do you manage an organization like that?”

  It was one of many questions the CIA and Congress never had answered. How do you run a secret intelligence service in an open democracy? How do you serve the truth by lying? How do you spread democracy by deceit?

  “IN THE END, THEY WON’T STAY”

  The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion.

  To succeed, the CIA needed to find men and women with the discipline and self-sacrifice of the nation’s best military officers, the cultural awareness and historical knowledge of the nation’s best diplomats, and the sense of curiosity and adventure possessed by the nation’s best foreign correspondents. It would help if those recruits were able to pass for Palestinians, Pakistanis, or Pathans. Americans like that were hard to find.

  “Can CIA meet the ongoing threat? The answer at this moment is no—absolutely not,” said Howard Hart, who had put his life on the line to run agents in Iran, smuggled guns to the Afghan rebels, and led the agency’s paramilitary officers. Hart said he took offense when Goss called the CIA “a bunch of dysfunctional jerks” and “a pack of idiots.” But he conceded that “CIA’s clandestine service can be criticized for not having done as well as it should have. That is a fair statement. Because we have people who just don’t pull their weight. And the reason that most of them are there is that we have no way to replace them.”

  President Bush pledged to increase the agency’s ranks by 50 percent. But quality, not quantity, was the crisis at hand. “What we don’t need is more money and people, at least not for now,” Carl Ford said. “Fifty percent more operators and fifty percent more analysts equals fifty percent more hot air.” The personnel problem was the same one Walter Bedell Smith had faced as director of central intelligence while the Korean War was raging: “We can’t get qualified people. They just simply don’t exist.”

  The CIA could not find enough talented Americans to serve as spies on a government salary. Hundreds had resigned at headquarters and in the field during 2004, infuriated and humiliated at the collapse of credibility and authority at the agency. Recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining young officers still remained the most difficult task at the agency.

  Goss vowed to find them. He went to his Senate confirmation hearings with a swagger on September 14, 2004, saying he could fix the CIA once and for all. “I don’t want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by telling you how bad I think the problem is,” he said before the cameras, but the problem would be solved. Upon his confirmation by a 77-to-17 vote from the full Senate, Goss went straight to CIA headquarters in a state of exhilaration.

  “I never in my wildest dreams expected I’d be back here,” he told the men and women he had roundly condemned three months before. “But here I am.” He proclaimed that his powers would be “enhanced by executive orders” from the president: he would be Bush’s intelligence briefer, the head of the CIA, director of central intelligence, national intelligence director, and chief of a new national counterterrorism center. He would not wear two hats, like his predecessors. He would wear five.

  On his first day of work, Goss began a purge more swift and sweeping than any in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. He forced almost every one of the CIA’s most senior officers out the door. He created a bitterness that had not been seen at headquarters in nearly thirty years. The resentment over the expulsion of Stephen Kappes as chief of the clandestine service was ferocious. Kappes, an ex-marine and former station chief in Moscow, represented the very best of the CIA. In partnership with the British intelligence service, he had only recently played a leading role in a triumph of intelligence and diplomacy by persuading Libya to abandon its long-running program to develop weapons of mass destruction. When he questioned Goss’s judgment, he was shown the door.

  The new director surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House—or some higher power—to rid the CIA of left-wing subversives. It was the perception at headquarters that Goss and his staff, the “Gosslings,” prized loyalty to the president and his policies above all, that they did not want the agency athwart of the White House, and that those who challenged them would pay the price. The scourging of the CIA was rightly a question of competence. It wrongly became a question of ideology.

  The director issued orders against dissent from the president’s policies. His message was clear: get with the program or get out. The latter choice looked more and more attractive for the talented tenth of the CIA’s personnel. A huge homeland security industry was growing at the outer edge of the beltway, selling its services to a government outsourcing expertise. The best of the agency’s people sold out. The CIA had been top-heavy with aging cold warriors fifteen years before. Now it was bottom-heavy with beginners. By 2005, half of the CIA’s workforce—operators and analysts alike—had five years’ experience or less.

  The president’s offhand proclamation that the agency was “jus
t guessing” about Iraq ignited a smoldering anger that burned throughout the ranks of those professionals who remained. The CIA’s officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith.

  Four former chiefs of the clandestine service tried to contact Goss to advise him to go slow, lest he destroy what remained of the CIA. He would not take their calls. One of them went public: “Goss and his minions can do a great deal of damage in short order,” Tom Twetten wrote in an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times on November 23,2004. “If the professional employees in the agency don’t believe the agency’s leadership is on their side, they won’t take risks for it and, in the end, they won’t stay.” The next day, John McLaughlin, who had held the agency together as acting director after Tenet’s resignation, delivered another riposte. The CIA was not “a ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘rogue’ agency,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “The CIA was not institutionally plotting against the president.” Haviland Smith, who had retired as chief of the counterterrorism staff, weighed in. “Porter Goss and his troops from the Hill are wreaking havoc,” he wrote. “Purging the CIA at this unfortunate moment, when we need to be dealing with real issues of terrorism, is cutting off our nose to spite our face.” In all the years that the agency had been battered in the press, never had the director been attacked in print, on the record, by the most senior veterans of American intelligence.